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I got an e-mail the other day from my trancefather asking me what has happened to the once-booming after-hours party scene in Tokyo, and whether the steady increase in police harassment has had anything to do with it.

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I know, some of you have asked yourself the same thing. Some of you couldn't care less. And some of you are scratching your heads with a totally different question -- "What's a trancefather?"

Let's answer the first group first, encourage the second group to care because it could be important, and as far as the third group, well, read on.

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The psy-trance after-hours scene in Tokyo seems to have devolved into a less sophisticated creature than it used to be. Most organizers aren't too keen anymore to try to launch a "fresh party" in the mornings with a sure-win lineup confirmed far enough in advance to get fliers designed, printed and distributed in order to attract enough people hopefully to maybe break even. It's not really viable unless a core following can be established at a weekly or even monthly event at the same venue on the same theme using a pool of reliable local DJs.

Since the clubs and halls around Tokyo all jacked up their prices a couple of years ago, it's become harder and harder for smaller organizers to field something in their reach. And within the reach of the big crowds returning to Tokyo from the halls in Odaiba or Chiba, but out of the reach of overzealous MPD fishermen whose assignments in effect steer potential patrons not away from a certain venue but toward another. The end effect is of course the same.

Word gets out quickly if cops are harassing enough people merely walking in the direction of a club. Which is what happened in Shibaura to corral crowds toward Roppongi. (Velfarre must have been losing money on Sunday mornings, so something had to be done, I guess. Has that cesspool finally been shut down for good? I wonder what they'll find when they start digging up Roppongi's version of Golgotha, which by the way was full of skull imagery.)

In the meantime, larger organizers discovered that they could more easily piggyback on crowds in high-turnout areas just by offering up an A-lister or two who is already in town to carry over an existing party. The organizer takes on reduced responsibilities acting as a booking agent. The artist earns an extra gig. The club picks up most of the work, but stands to tidy up handsomely at the bar. Tack up a few posters, change a banner or two, and it's the official after-hours party. Win-win-win, really, for the artist, organizer and club, albeit on a smaller and unlevel playing field.

For the rest of us, it's a draw at best. The choice between any after-hours in sleazy Roppongi or a quiet coffee at home after a hard night on a Tokyo dancefloor is no choice at all. But that is what we have been left with for the time being.

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And for the nagging question: Your trancefather, or trancemother. is the person(s) who introduced you to trance, usually the one who took you to your first trance party. Now, if you have no tranceparents and found our beautiful genre all on your own, this does not necessarily mean you are a bastard. The psychedelic community has a very liberal policy on this and will allow you to adopt the person(s) most responsible for your musical liberation.

It's no shame to have two tranceparents of the same sex, if, for example, one buddy introduced you to the music and another buddy was instrumental in getting you out to your first party.

If your tranceparents were an actual couple that is no longer together, then each tranceparent's new partner can be called a step-tranceparent, provided they can show proof of attending at least one open-air rave in the past 18 months, such as a wristband, ticket stub, embarassing party photo or movie, etc. Cheers!

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The Second Room regretfully announces the immediate suspension of Psychedelic Radar trance party promotions and all post-party reports following revelations of an alleged incident of coercive entrapment more ridiculous than the Deep Blue roundup that sank Zodiac Music some 2 1/2 years ago.

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Details of this recent event are unfolding and being withheld voluntarily at the moment. But suffice it to say that I now feel it unwise to continue giving out free hints as to where I might be, or may have been, on a given night to people who frighten me and that I don't feel like running into.

I have provided links at right for you to scope out upcoming parties. I will add more links soon to fill out the list.

Honestly, I should have stopped writing up party promotions after experiencing the police state firsthand outside Zepp Tokyo last year. Read further down in this blog for a description of that. But 2006 was hopping and summer was coming and the calender was full of open-air festivals. So I gave it some thought and kept it going.

Here we are seven months later and party calenders in Tokyo and Osaka are still full -- 2007 is off to a blazing start like I've never seen for any January. I know that the organizers, artists and labels have been largely pleased with getting their Psychedelic Radar mentions on a mainstream Web site like The Japan Times, and I have enjoyed being given the opportunity to do something positive for Japan's trance scene. I think the scene can carry itself until next summer while I absorb myself with work, music production and video editing. (That's my backup story and I'm stickin' to it!)

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The lurid tale of the October 2004 Deep Blue roundup in Roppongi, as told to me firsthand, goes like this. One morning just a few minutes after a large group of "VIPs" (read: Family guys) leaves this 6th Floor open bar, a gaggle of cops barge in and tells the 15-20 remaining people to stop what they are doing. Then they begin searching the bar for "the evidence" of drugs. This goes on for several minutes while they check the couches, the VIP room, the toilets and even the CDs in the rack above the bar -- pulling out and checking individually each of more than 50 CDs. (Your tax money at work, folks!)

Somewhere amid all the movement a nondescript guy in an overcoat joins the search, which has yet to produce even one of those little tiny ziplock bags that so freely litter Roppongi. No evidence? No problem! This guy, who has blended in with the other officers, saunters over near the bar, reaches down and feels around in the dark without a flashlight like he suddenly figured out the bad guy's trick and behold, produces out of an impossibly small nook a small box that contains a green leafy substance. Grass out of thin air? Nice trick! Nothing up your overcoat sleeve now, eh, Detective Columbo?

So when the cop with the biggest mouth pipes up and asks who the box belongs to, the people being detained in the bar are all telling the truth when they say that they don't know. And this is where the gestapo bastards get you:

"OK, nobody is going to admit that it's theirs. We're gonna do a little chemical test on this marijuana we found, and if it comes up the wrong color to mean it's illegal, then we are taking all of you into custody until we find out THE TRUTH!"

Guess what? The test on this immaculate dope showed the wrong color. Uh, oh! And all those people were rudely yanked out of their lives for a minimum of 23 days on NO CHARGES and PLANTED EVIDENCE. There was at least one poor fellow who left behind traces of something bad in his urine, he was there much longer.

One of those unfortunate detainees was working there on irregular part-time shifts at about 1,000 yen per hour so he could bring home at least some money while doing something he was good at. On this fateful morning, he was DJ'ing, cleaning glasses, delivering drinks at the bar counter and wiping up wet circles from people who can't remember to use a coaster. I had been begging him for weeks to quit this place -- even today just thinking about it gives me the creeps. Aside from not wanting this very same thing to happen to a sincere friend, it just wasn't worth the 5,000 yen or so takehome pay per day. But his Zodiac Music events were bombing because he continually allowed himself to get shafted by poor business choices. The record company had given him a raw deal on his second compilation as well. Bills are bills and children must be fed, and he worked there one day too many.

I showed up at Cube326 in the Shibaura area of Minato Ward one Friday night in October 2004 to play my first gig as an official Zodiac resident DJ and was greeted with mass confusion about the timetable. For some reason an extra DJ was there to play and could I cut my set short to fit him in, hell no, blah, blah, blah, "and where in the hell is Kemal?"

Kemal wasn't coming. Kemal was a guest of the police state, "participating in the investigation." Inside they wear you down with endless discipline under depressing and demoralizing conditions. And as often as they can get around to you, expect illegal threats, getting yanked out suddenly for special questioning, being forced to wade through endless albums of trance party photos -- most of them in that annoying "V-sign" pose that these kids can't stop themselves from doing anytime someone says "cheeeeee-zu!"

They show these photos over and over again with varied question patterns until they start to look exactly the same. "Do you know this person? That person? That one? That one?" They also go to your home and misdirect your family into thinking you are Charles Manson. (Got a Japanese mother-in-law? You may never fix this damage.)

It does you no good to hear from me about life inside one of these holding tanks and the daily dramas that manifest out of various induced psychoses in an ordeal like this. You need to hear it firsthand, see the permanent scars in their psyche up close, listen to this victim as they unfold for you the most harrowing, unpleasant, humiliating and wholly unnecessary 23 days of their life, barring any time spent in Camp X-ray or the inescapable clutches of a depraved psycho torture/kill machine. Which could be one and the same.

Endless questions calulated to produce perjury in the weary, until you confess, or until your second 10-day "investigation period" ends 23 days after simply going to work on the wrong day.
If you assumed that by giving your full cooperation and allowing yourself to get taken inside and losing 23 opportunites to earn a daily wage when there was not one piece of evidence that they will even mutter a "thank you," then you are wrong. No apology, no redress -- "Get out and don't ever let me see you again!" if you get that much. I was told it's actually more of a high-pitch grunting sound, like a skunk bitching because he sprayed himself.

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The next time I saw Kemal after his ordeal, I greeted a once-proud talented man whose will had been shattered. He had lost weight, especially in his face. He was more nervous than I had ever seen him. His attention was distracted and his eyes darted off during and between drags off never-ending cigarettes at simple shapes lurking in the shadows. The debts and the emotional pain, the lost income, it was too much. Kemal faced a choice of trying to recoup his losses against bad odds and maybe regain his pride in some break-even gigs, or he could turn his back on psy-trance, start over with a six-day-a-week factory job and pay back his debts.

It was the end of my brief residency but it was an awakening for my dear friend. These days Kemal is doing great, looks healthy and was maybe even going off cigarettes. He just excludes evil Tokyo from his life. Perhaps being shocked back into his place in the Matrix was the best thing for Kemal, but it was a shitty deal and one that killed a still-promising career.

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Parents and loved ones are the people best qualified to tell someone to stop using drugs, so I'll leave that righteous lecture to them. But you are risking certain hell if you're dumb and/or brazen enough to carry around drugs with you anywhere, especially in Japan. Which is exactly the mind set that the police state succeeds in creating. Now, ask yourself why.

Here we are again at the weekend and I’m seriously having any doubts about going out. It’s not that there is nothing to do. In fact, the Solstice Music party at Differ on Saturday should pack one helluva punch with Etnica headlining.

Joining Italians Max and Maurizio for this Etnicanet special are live acts
7even Sister7, Pleiadians, and Species – first live in Japan – and DJs
Max vs. Maurizio, Ryo of Solstice Music and Klowd aka O.D.A.

For more info, go to Solstice Web site. Click on “Events,” and then “Other Party Info.”

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BrainBusters 1st Anniversary Party
Saturday, Jan. 6 at Tokyo Kinema Club
(http://www.brainbusters.info/)

I unexpectedly found myself at the BrainBusters “Helter Skelter in Tokyo” at Kinema last Saturday night. Killer party where a bunch of “hisashiburi” (“haven’t seen you in a while”) friends showed up unexpectedly to toast in the new year.

In any other year, I would have been hammered down with a wicked flu on the first weekend after New Year’s Eve, along with everyone else. I credit the extra day since Sunday and the more dispersed New Year’s crowd for part of the solid turnout for BrainBusters and my willingness to travel across town for it. It was a good decision.

Tokyo Kinema is a fairly cool place. It reminds me of Junkbox over in Shibaura with its wide dance floor and seating around the fringes. But the mezzanine area upstairs is much larger, with more chairs and couches to entrench yourself and still catch a hint of the bass. The runway to the bar lets people line up three deep without congesting the dancefloor.

BrainBusters charged 6,000 yen at the door (5,000 yen advance) and gave everybody a copy of their “Looney Tunes” compilation. The price seemed a little high for the lineup – live acts Xenomorph, oCeLoT and Derango, plus DJ SpliffNik – however, at least 300 people did show up, meaning that Dana & Co. can pay Kinema’s expensive tab.

The music was a bit strenuous to absorb the longer the night went on, especially with no Red Bull energy drink on hand. My brain rebelled the next day by making me believe that the Indian pop playing inside a restaurant was actually fun music.

OK, 2007, Let’s See What You Got!

NEW YEAR’S DAY -- I started my new year with Alien vs. The Cat at Shinjuku Face (used to be Liquid Room, but neither name makes any damn sense). It’s my first time at this place, possibly one of my last.

I’m not the Shinjuku clubbin’ type for starters, but I ended up hiking up those 6 flights of stairs twice last night only to arrive in a swarming jungle of people all playing the kind of games that people do in Shinjuku. The significance of making a New Year’s Day climb up all those steps just to reach a shrine of debauchery was not wasted on me. Only a fool would do it twice. No wait, that’s Mount Fuji.

We’re not here to talk about that. Club M’s dancefloor is even more vicious. Only the music made it tolerable. Being knocked over by falling gals three times in a night is a new record for me. (They just don’t wear sensible shoes, these chicks!)

At first I thought that I was just being caught up in the moment when Ari Linker (Alien Project) and Avi Algranati (Space Cat) started their set just after the countdown to 2007. There was champagne, after all. What several hundred people and I were being treated to is going to be one of the dominating sounds of 2007.

We all loved the first Alien vs. The Cat album because of the distinctive Alien Project and Space Cat signatures in each track. “Space Jam” (July 2004) was a benchmark contribution to our music’s ongoing collaborative renaissance. In the year that we needed it most, Ari and Avi called us back to the dancefloor, and a string of collaborative projects have followed.

The word “versus” in a project name sort of implies that the artists are collaborating as kind of a one-, or maybe a two-time thing. Digital music studios on notebook PCs are responsible for most of the track titles with “vs.” we’re seeing these days, followed by the ease of files transfers on the Internet, and then down to the small handful of collaborations actually done in a studio setting.

And in the past couple of years, Ari and Avi have been working together so much, on the road, in the studio, over the Net, they have arrived at a true balance of their talents. Where “Space Jam” really played out as the Alien Project sound “versus” the Space Cat sound, their just-released second album “Hear The Noise” (Spun Records) and the incredible live set I heard last night are the beginning of a brand new sound. It should be Alien “and” The Cat, not “vs.” (Maybe they can do this with the newly launched H2O record label. More on that later.)

A third Alien & The Cat album – hey how about that? – is also on the way and should be in DJ sets here in time for the cherry blossom parties in late March. Happy Birthday to Avi, who turned 36 on New Year’s Eve. Watching these two geniuses work together is a luxury you should not miss this year.

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I retreated from Shinjuku much later in the morning than I wanted to, but after a quiet coffee I was coaxed into checking out a progressive party at the venerable Cube326. The gig was the debut event for a very nice friend and she got a decent size turnout, hopefully enough to pay the bills. The dancefloor was full, everybody moving, sometimes cheering, girls shaking themselves around, guys grinning ear to ear. Supposedly the live act playing when I left is one of the best in progressive.

It’s a fact that you can draw more people to a club with progressive, or house, or drum and bass. D-Nox and Beckers tracks are even knocking over our psytrance crowd. A little bit of this at the party is a fun change of rhythm. I simply can’t understand how people can keep dancing to this lame mind-numbing crap for longer than 45 minutes in an environment like this.

Progressive is great music for the car, or maybe a brisk walk. But after 45 minutes you have heard everything that you are going to hear – the next 45 minutes is the same series of useless tedious buildups that usually go nowhere of interest and the same combinations of boring basslines. It’s so boring that progressive DJ’s get antsy and start adding in mistimed kicks and other distractions which inexplicably drives the crowd wild. Seriously, I just don’t get it.

The hard trance being played on Cube’s 4th Floor was equally devoid of any sense of life or “story” in the dark acid being overpumped to another surprising crowd. Same thing, only faster and soul-sucking dark.

What the hell, the ordeal gave me perspective. It reminded me of what I love about psychedelic trance.

I wish you all the best possible tidings in 2007. We’re now within six years of the 2012 Winter Solstice and things could get a little weird from here on. Remember why we dance and keep it psychedelic! Cheers!